With a gimlet eye and a caustic wit, Mark Twain is the quintessential tour guide to parts known and unknown, and in these 68 travel yarns he trots readers around the globe from Hawaii to the Holy Land, from Lake Tahoe to Berlin—"Europe's Chicago"—with a combination of breezy insouciance and droll barbarism. This fine edition, edited by Mark Twain Prize founder Peter Kaminsky, includes pieces from Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and A Tramp Abroad, as well as a variety of rarely seen articles and lectures, trips to magical realms ("Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"), and a letter from 18-year-old Sam Clemens to his mother.

"There is no great American writer easier to love than Mark Twain, and—as I realized reading this delicious collection—no part of Twain's oeuvre easier to love than his travel writing. Wandering around exotic places and among foreign people gives him the ideal opportunity to be his uniquely engaging self—not quite an innocent or a tramp but a curious, clear-eyed and totally American chronicler abroad: totally game, bewitched and appalled, funny and astounded."—Kurt Andersen